LAW ENFORCEMENT
YOU SAID - WE DID - NOW IT'S YOUR TURN!
by Richard Stones, Security Director, National Business Crime Forum
I write this article with just over 6 months remaining of my 30-year Police service. Still enthusiastic and doing a job you love, you begin to appreciate that ‘every dog has its day’ and that actually change is good and very necessary in the case of our collective response to business crime.
Some 26 years ago I worked on a shoplifting team in Nottingham City Centre where we were on first name terms with store managers, their ‘plain clothes store detectives’, even the shop staff and the regulars, our local offenders. Back in the day we spent our time encouraging the development of the local shop watch or radio net schemes and the travelling criminal was the exception, something the senior members of the team liked to get ‘their teeth into’ as it meant foreign force enquiries.
When we look back over these years however it wasn’t uncommon for businesses to tell us that they felt marginalised by Policing, and typically quoted the fact that we, the Police, didn’t see business as victims of crime. How times have changed!
Over the last two years particularly there has been a dramatic shift in the emphasis that Policing has placed upon business crime. There has also been a dramatic shift in the collaboration between retailers nationally and the Police. I never imagined 30 years ago that we’d have a National Policing Lead for business crime, DCC Susannah Fish OBE, or that I would become Staff Officer to this important portfolio. Nor did I expect to see Business Crime form part of the national risk register. These changes are significant and I acknowledge the determination that DCC Fish has shown with her ACPO colleagues to listen to your concerns and effectively change the way that Policing nationally will support business.
The most significant business policing changes have occurred over the last couple of years. Why? Because YOU, the industry, told us YOU needed change, YOU needed more collaborative, simplified consistent responses to the crimes YOU suffer. YOU need to demonstrate best value to boards and shareholders. No different to Policing then! We, the Police, need to demonstrate to our masters in exactly the same way, best use of resources and efficiency through collaboration and partnerships.
Let’s be honest though, irrespective of our individual accountability, the legacy practices of the 80s when I started Policing also needed to change to recognise the changing face of crime, criminals, offending patterns, technology, and prevention.
So, ‘YOU said and we did’ and over the last 18 months the National Policing Lead for Business Crime Reduction has engaged with an extensive range of partners across all business sectors to ensure that the national Policing response represents the views of the victims, be they large multi-national corporations through to the cottage industry operating from home. This process has resulted in the introduction of the definition of business crime, the ongoing cross-sector development of the business resilience partnership standards, the appointment of force business crime points of contacts (SPOCs) and also the Primary Authority relationship with business. The fundamental objective of all these pieces of work, YOU told us, was to ensure that victims of business crime consistently receive the best support and advice available to them irrespective of their size, geographical location, or sector.
YOU also told us that business, large or small, recognise the value of partnerships but as the main financial contributors to these partnerships you wanted common standards and consistency. To quote one frustrated national head of security, ‘is it beyond our collective capabilities to design a common set of standards that makes our participation in partnerships consistent? My team are expected to engage at a local level in partnerships but even in the same county we can’t get consistency and therefore we don’t get best value’!
This comment resonates with me as I could draw the same analogy with Policing. The two common partners in all partnerships are business and the Police and yet it is us that have to adapt our national practices to engage with partnerships when in reality if we had common standards, locally managed but nationally consistent, we would get better value for all from our engagement.
The Co-op work with the Home Office a few years ago highlighted the disparate national response to a business crime. If you’ve heard me speaking at one of your many events you will have seen me display their UK map of partnerships covered in the green and red dots, used to indicate different approaches to business crime. It looks like someone fired a shotgun at a map of the UK and for each hole devised a different response to business crime! Great locally but this legacy is now, as YOU tell us, inhibiting the processes we collectively need to introduce to be fit for the 21st century. ‘YOU said and we did’ by working with YOU to start designing Business Resilience Standards for partnerships.
There are some very effective partnerships operating nationally, supported by some very effective partnership bodies, however there are some that fall well short and if we recognise that any partnership is better than no partnership by introducing some common standards we can bring all partnerships up to the same standard.
Another frustration from national retailers particularly was, ‘we have to pay to put our intelligence into the different partnerships only to receive the same intelligence back in another format which, due to different partnership policies and procedures means we can’t share with others’. ‘You said, we did’ by working with YOU to develop Primary Authority relationships, which manage expectations, recognise best practice and apply it nationally in a consistent manner.
Not surprisingly, austerity has been a key driver for change for us all. What we could once get by with is no longer good enough. It’s forced us all to review our processes and to work differently. Very quickly YOU raised the issue of data sharing and maximising the value of your intelligence and information. Not only are data sharing policies different locally, so are the local IT systems that collate the data. Is this sensible? Well it’s ethical as people want freedom of choice. Sensible though? Not really, unless of course these independent systems collaborate and the silo’d data is shared centrally at some point to extract what I call the ‘golden nuggets’ of information that these systems likely hold. Criminals are opportunists and flit from crime type to crime type and victim to victim. By recognising this and sharing cross-sector data you tease out the ‘Golden nuggets’ to everyone’s benefit.
Simply, YOU told us YOU wanted better value for your intelligence and so in addition to everything I’ve listed, and in conjunction with the National Business Crime Forum (NBCF) we have put a model in place to enable this, we now need YOU to support this!
Two years ago the National Business Crime Forum (NBCF) was formed by a cross section of the business community who recognised that their individual business risk could be better addressed in collaboration rather than isolation. Now Chaired by Don Randall MBE (CISO at the Bank of England) and with Honorary President Ruth Henig OBE, the forum members quickly recognised the value of combining the information and intelligence held individually by businesses and their respective membership organisations. To that end the NBCF approached business sponsors on your behalf to form a public private intelligence capability that sits independently between law enforcement and the private sector and through the use of public and private sector analysts maximises the potential of the information and intelligence you hold.
This time YOU said and You did, through the NBCF YOU identified the need to do things differently and the board of the forum approached benevolent business to support the initiative and now we have the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS). Governed by the NBCF, the not-for-profit NBCS works with businesses to add value to the silo’d data that they hold. With the use of analysts from law enforcement and by utilising the Police business crime points of contact network the NBCS has already delivered some impressive results.
The National Business Crime Solution recently received the 'Best Collaborative Solution 2014' award at the annual Retail Fraud awards ceremony in Leicester.
For more information on the National Business Crime Solution, contact Catherine.bowen@nationalbusinesscrimesolution.com
